History

The churches belonging to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in North and South America were technically referred to as belonging to the Epitropia of the Holy Sepulchre in America since the Church of Jerusalem did not have any local resident diocese but is essentially a representational or diplomatic church (i.e. a metochion).

The Jerusalem Patriarchate had a long history in the United States dating back to the 1920s but recently become more established with the appointment of Archbishop Damaskinos of Jaffa as Epitropos in 2002. Under Damaskinos' leadership there was significant development. The jurisdiction included fifteen parishes and two monasteries, the Monastery of the Glorious Ascension (Resaca, Georgia) and the Monastery of the Holy Cross in East Setauket, NY, which served as the headquarters of the jurisdiction in America.

Tensions existed between this jurisdiction and the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, as the latter claims that Jerusalem worked to pull parishioners away from Antiochian (and Greek) parishes and into its own jurisdiction. The Ben Lomond crisis of 1998, in which an Antiochian parish in California split into two factions, one of which eventually made its way into the Jerusalem Patriarchate (including the re-ordination of some of the clergy), further exacerbated these tensions.

As a result, as of May 2, 2003, American Antiochian clergy are forbidden by their primate from concelebrating with American Jerusalem clergy (though not with clergy of the Jerusalem Patriarchate assigned to parishes in the Middle East).